Queer left politics, pop culture and skepticism

About the author

Alex Gabriel is the author of Godlessness in Theory, a blog about religion and how to leave it, popular rhetoric and political dissent, secular, nerd and LGBT cultures, sexuality and gender or whatever else comes to mind. mralexgabriel@me.com; @AlexGabriel.

The Moving Social Justice conference will take place in Los Angeles between October 11 and 12. Together with African Americans for Humanism and the Secular Student Alliance, Black Skeptics are sponsoring it – in the spring, they announced on their blog here:

Going beyond the narrow scope of ‘atheist good’ versus ‘religion bad’, the conference will feature panels, presentations and strategy sessions on the following issues:

What political voice should people of color non-believers have in a national and global context in which the racial wealth gap has become gargantuan, increasing numbers of Black and Latino youth are being imprisoned and fewer have access to a college education?

What coalition-building needs to be done between activist non-believers of color and progressive faith institutions in our communities?

How can the under-represented issues of queer and LGBTQ youth of color (who have the highest rates of homelessness in the U.S.) be addressed beyond mainstream single variable paradigms of ‘coming out’ and same sex marriage?

What does a humanist feminist of color agenda look like given the European American feminist orientation of most freethought scholarship and activism in the U.S.?

How can atheists of color effectively challenge homophobia and transphobia in the Black Church and other faith institutions?

What is the connection between economic justice, community development and culturally relevant humanism?

Amen to all of the above.

Since then the programme has been updated to list specific panels on

Youth leadership & busting prison pipelining

Feminism(s) of Color & community activism

Anti-racism and the myth of colorblindness

Confronting homophobia & transphobia in the Black Church

Culturally relevant humanism: what is it and why do we need it?

LGBTQ atheists of color and social justice

Many of us, Hutchinson included, have been pushing atheist orgs to have these conversations for years now – it’s encouraging to see headway being made.

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A couple of days ago I asked for your advice about which U.S. nonprofit I should give Greta Christina’s money. I promised at the time to let you know which one I picked, and although she’s let the cat out of the bag, this is that post.

Plenty of excellent organisations were suggested, and I encourage all of you to read the thread – but the one that stuck out above all others was Black Skeptics Los Angeles. (They have a blog, if you weren’t aware, on this network.)

In my post requesting recommendations, I said I was particularly keen to hear about secular groups focused among other things on aiding lower-class communities, women, queer people and youth. BSLA works on all these issues: founder Sikivu Hutchinson has, in the last few years, been one of the most important voices calling for secular social engagement, writing in June about white atheism’s race and class problems, and via the Women’s Leadership Project has spearheaded ‘the only program for girls of colour in the Los Angeles Unified school district that explicitly addresses the relationship between organised religion, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and heterosexism’.

Donations to BSLA at the moment go toward its ‘First in the Family’ humanist scholarship fund, which in Greta’s words makes higher education possible for ‘South Los Angeles LAUSD students who are going to be the first in their immediate families to go to college, giving preference to students who are (or have been) in foster care, homeless, undocumented and/or LGBTQ’.

Remind me again how social justice warriors make atheists look bad?

Being able to support this work is a huge honour, and I’m proud to be doing so. May BSLA get all the recognition they deserve.

‘Why Lena Dunham’s Curves Make Me Feel Like Shit About My Own’, by Chelsea Leibow (Feminspire)The extremism against her form, the repulsion I’ve witnessed from not just random commenters hiding behind a handle, but real friends willing to screech about their need for a sick bag when they see her on screen, break my goddamn heart. Because god forbid I be so lucky as to have a career like this woman’s.

‘Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris Are Old News: A Totally Different Atheism Is on the Rise’, by Chris Hall (AlterNet)When old-school atheists attempt to dismiss social justice issues as ‘mission drift,’ it seems like a betrayal of the very principle that was most attractive about standing up and identifying as an atheist in the first place.

‘It’s Time For People to Stop Using the Social Construct of “Biological Sex” to Defend Their Transmisogyny’, by Mey (Autostraddle)Those who claim that sex is determined by chromosomes must not realize that sex is assigned at birth not by chromosomes, not even by gonads, but by genitals. In fact, the vast majority of us never learn what our sex chromosomes are. Sex isn’t something we’re actually born with, it’s something that doctors or our parents assign us at birth.

‘Scotland should go it alone’, by Dòmhnall Iain Dòmhnallach (The Oxford Student)Voting yes to independence is not anglophobic – it is a statement that the people who happen to live in Scotland deserve better than Westminster. Voting yes means voting no to nuclear weapons, no to the bedroom tax, no to the all-out assault on the welfare state which has become almost axiomatic within the London parties.

‘Atheism has a big race problem that no one’s talking about’, by Sikivu Hutchinson (The Washington Post)When [black nonbelievers] look to atheist and humanist organizations for solidarity on these issues, there is a staggering lack of interest. And though some mainstream atheist organizations have jumped on the ‘diversity’ bandwagon, they haven’t seriously grappled with the issue. Simply trotting out atheists of color to speak about ‘diversity’ at overwhelmingly white conferences doesn’t cut it.

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You already know that I’m a #FTBully. Of all the letters after my name (admittedly, there aren’t very many), those are the ones I’m proudest of. My feeling is, that tells you all you need know about me. Keep reading though.

I’m 22, secular, British, poly, queer, tall, ex-Christian, “left wing and long-winded”, a nerd, a graduate and a keyboard warrior. What that actually means is fallacious discourses piss me off, and so do faulty ideas they transmit. I’m skeptical, you might say, in that sense.

The backdrop to my joining this network is an organised skepticism more divided than ever, teetering toward civil war. I have no problems with that division. If our blogosphere and the community around it become the dogfight expected right now, things will get worse before they get better – but they will, I think, get better. There are problems in our movement – racism, misogyny, transphobia, harassment, wage theft, corruption – that we need to fix, and any chance we take by addressing them is a chance for self-improvement. Should skepticism implode in the coming weeks or months, there’s no point letting it implode again a year or several down the line: the time for staring down internal conflicts, all of them, is now.

Because of that, there won’t just be posts here on UK atheism – that is, on why our image as a godless paradise is unwarranted, our secular community underdeveloped and our strains of fundamentalism growing. There won’t just be posts on leaving extreme religion – how Hallowe’en once terrified me, how my niece was an evangelical at four years old and how I thought aged eight that Satan had possessed me. There won’t just be posts about mainstream and LGBT culture’s myths of sexuality, about sex and relationships, about the nerdsphere or about far-right religion’s fast-forming grip on UK campuses. There will be all of those, sooner or later, but not just those.

I named this blog Godlessness in Theory because I think we need new secular dialectics. I first encountered things like feminism and social justice largely through the atheist scene – I came of age reading Skepchick, Butterflies and Wheels andGreta Christina’s Blog – and I think it’s valuable, vital in fact, to view our movement through those kinds of frameworks. I’m not convinced, though, that it’s enough to switch between discourses as I’ve found myself doing; to blog on atheism some days and queerness others. The most exciting thoughts I’ve had in skepticism have been listening to Pragna Patel, Sikivu Hutchinson or Natalie Reed, in whose work secularity and social justice collide and complete, coherent modes of thinking germinate which speak to both. I love these writers’ work, because this is more than intersectional action; it’s an innovative, synthetic analysis. Pursuing secular synthesis as they have – bringing godlessness into theory, and vice versa – is my long-term stated aim. That’s what I’m here for, and what I think can repair our movement – even, perhaps, make it stronger than ever.

Wish me luck.

For the moment, an overview: if you haven’t read anything by me before, or you’ve read a post or two and you want to read more, the following ten posts are a good place to start.

I’m looking at archiving the rest of my past writing here; to stay updated in the mean time, go and Like this blog on Facebook. If you feel like you still want more, browse through my writing in the areas linked or see my blogroll here for the people I like reading. You can also drop me a line via email or Twitter, and believe me, I’ll be reading the comments.

Hello if we don’t know each other. Hello again if we already do. And hello Freethought Blogs – you’re the greatest network of them all. I’m thrilled to be here.